EXHIBITIONS

Alexandra Palace

Alexandra Palace opened in 1873. Sixteen days later the building burned down. Two years later the rebuilt facility reopened. The owners experienced sustained financial difficulties. In 1900 a Parliamentary Act established a set of trustees who took over the site. In 1935 the B.B.C. moved into part of the building and used it as a centre for making live television programmes. Later on, the Corporation used Alexandra Palace as a transmission centre. In 1980 Haringey Council acquired the site. Eight years later the facility reopened.

Location: Alexandra Palace Way, Wood Green, N22 7AY

Website: www.alexandrapalace.com

Earl's Court

Kiralfy Imre leased the Earl's Court Exhibition Grounds. His Empire of India exhibition (1895) was an even bigger hit that the Venice At Olympia show. It was followed by the Coronation Fair (1897), the Greater Britain Exhibition (1899), and the Woman s Exhibition (1900). He aspired to create something that was not transient. He bought 140 acres to the north of Shepherds Bush Green. On 40 acres of the site, he constructed a series of stucco-clad buildings in a variety of styles. These gave the complex its White City complex. On the rest of the site a fun fair was erected. The project cost 2m.

The Festival of Britain

A Festival of Britain was proposed in 1943. Three years later the Victoria & Albert Museum staged an exhibition entitled Britain Can Make It. The idea of a centenary celebration of the Great Exhibition of 1851 was first floated by John Gloag in a letter that he wrote to The Times newspaper. Gerald Barry, a manager at the News Chronicle, capitalised on the basic concept with an open letter addressed to the Labour politician Sir Stafford Cripps who was then the President of the Board of Trade. This called for the event to have a cultural and trade character. The scheme was assigned a 12m Budget. The Labour politician Herbert Morrison, who was a leading member of the London County Council, assumed a prominent role in the project. For the principal home for the event, he nominated a span of derelict ground that lay between the South Bank ends of Waterloo Bridge and Westminster Bridge. The site was next to County Hall, the seat of the L.C.C.. In 1948 Barry was appointed both as the Festival's Director-General and as the chairman of the committee that oversaw its arrangements. He delegated the creative aspects of the Festival to the architect Hugh Casson.

The Royal Festival Hall was built to provide London with a music venue that was of a similar-size to the Queen's Hall in Langham Place, which had been destroyed by aerial bombing during the Second World War. Laurie Lee, a former Ministry of Information employee, wrote the captions for the 30,000 exhibits.¹ 70% of the creators of the Festival were European migr s and migr es. The Festival took place in 1951. It was applauded as a great success.

The Dome of Discovery was designed by Ralph Tubbs. The Land of Britain and People of Britain pavilions were designed by H.T. Cadbury-Brown (1913-2009). He drew inspiration for these structures from the fountains in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles. Lansbury Estate in Poplar was an exhibition of living architecture.

When Winston Churchill visited the Festival of Britain, he was fascinated by the escalator and rode it repeatedly. He had to be forcefully reminded that there were other items that he should be looking at.

Location: The South Bank, SE1 9GY

Website: www.southbankcentre.co.uk/about/what-we-do/1951-festival-britain-remembered www.vam.ac.uk/articles/the-festival-of-britain

¹. Lee was to go on to write the childhood memoir Cider With Rosie (1959).

The Mystery of the Skylon

One of the features of the Festival site that made a particular impact was the 296-ft.-tall Skylon, which had been designed by the architects Sir Philip Powell and Hildago Moya.¹ The name Skylon was suggested by Sheppard Fidler. When the Labour-sponsored event closed, the Skylon, despite its size, disappeared. What happened to it has long been a mystery. One theory is that members of the incoming Conservative administration sought to raze every trace of the Festival that they could.

¹. The Skylon echoed the Trilon of a previous World's Fair.

The Great Exhibition of 1851

In both France and Belgium exhibitions had been staged that created a precedent for the Great Exhibition. Henry Cole had attended one such event in Paris just before he proposed what became the Great Exhibition. At the time, he was working in the Public Record Office as an Assistant Keeper.¹ The event's purpose was to showcase the technical and material advances that had been made in the preceding years. In 1850 a Royal Commission was instituted to raise funds for the project. Initially, people proved to be slow to come forward to offer money to financially underwrite the Great Exhibition. The contractor Morton Peto furnished a 50,000 guarantee for the venture. Thereafter, people became willing to contribute to it. The Exhibition was held in Hyde Park in the Sir Joseph Paxton-designed Crystal Palace. The structure was erected on a twenty-acre site near the Prince of Wales's Gate. The 300,000 panes of glass were manufactured for the Palace. There was a 27-ft. (8.2m)-tall fountain that Schweppes provided that had tonic water flowing from it.

Not everyone liked what they saw. The designer William Morris felt moved to found Morris & Company as a reaction to the furniture that he had been displayed at the Exhibition.

At the event's closure the Crystal Palace building was bought by the Brighton Railway Company. The structure was re-erected in 1854 in an extended form at Sydenham in south London. The cabinets in J. Floris are from the Exhibition.

Location: The Old Football Pitches, Hyde Park, W2 2UH (orange, purple)

Crystal Palace Park, Thicket Road, SE19 2GA

¹. Subsequently, Cole became the founding director of the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria & Albert Museum), which was set up with part of the surplus proceeds from the Exhibition.

Thomas Cook

In 1841 Thomas Cook used a railway line to transport people from his native Leicester to a temperance rally that was held at nearby Loughborough. In 1845 Cook organised a tour to Liverpool. His business was given a considerable fillip by the Great Exhibition of 1851. The first Thomas Cook group tour to Europe took place in 1855. In 1862 the International Exhibition was held in London. By then the railway companies had become more skilled in handling tours. As a result, the entrepreneur found himself frozen out of tour arranging and so was forced to focus on organising hotel accommodation. This broadened his firm's expertise. In 1865 he moved his business from Leicester to London.

Location: 45 Berkeley Street, W1J 8EJ (orange, pink)

Website: www.thomascook.com

The Imperial Institute

In 1880 an Indian Museum was opened as part of the Albertpolis development in South Kensington. The Colonial & Indian Exhibition of 1886 was held in the Royal Horticultural Society's South Ken gardens as part of the celebrations of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. To commemorate the event The Imperial Institute was founded the following year. The Imperial Institute had a 700 ft.-long front. The central Queen's Tower was 287 ft.-tall. It was flanked two shorter towers.

In 1953 the government announced a major expansion of Imperial College. The Institute's buildings were largely demolished to facilitate this growth. All that is left of it on the expanded campus was an 85m.-tall, white tower. This is topped by a green dome of oxidised copper.

In 1958 the Institute was renamed the Commonwealth Institute. It moved to a building (1960) at the western end of Kensington High Street. In the early 1960s there was a plan to demolish the Queen's Tower. This was successfully opposed John Betjeman and the Victorian Society. In 2003 it was announced that the Institute was relocating to Cambridge. Its collection became part of the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum in Bristol. In 2007 the Kensington building was sold.

Location: Imperial College Road, SW7 2AZ (purple, yellow)

224 Kensington High Street, W8 6NQ (purple, pink)

The O2

The Richard Rogers practice delivered the Millennium Dome for 70m. By the square metre, it was cheaper than an I.K.E.A. store. However, the building suffered immensely through being associated with the large overspend of the exhibition that went inside. This cost over 600m.

In 2009 Trinity College Cambridge bought a 999-year-long lease on the O2 arena.

Location: Peninsula Square, SE10 0DX

Website: www.theo2.co.uk

Olympia

Location: Hammersmith Road, W14 8UX (orange, purple)

Website: https://olympia.london

The Greatest Show On Earth

In the winter of 1889-90 P.T. Barnum's Greatest Show On Earth was presented at Olympia. Within three months it was seen by 2,500,00 people. He appeared at every show, being driven around in a gilded carriage. He presented a set of his clothes to Madame Tussaud's so that his waxwork could be dressed in them.

Tom Thumb was presented to Queen Victoria. Her journal makes clear that was displeased by the way in which his handlers treated him.

Imre Kiralfy

At the age of four Imre Kiralfy (d.1919) started to perform as a folk dancer. He worked across Europe. In 1869 he emigrated to New York. There, he and his brother Bolossy built up a business that staged bombastic pseudo-educative historically-themed spectacular shows, which were performed by casts of thousands of people. In 1887 the sibs fell out. Imre staged The Fall of Babylon. In 1889 he mounted The Fall of Nero.

Barnum & Bailey paid Kiralfy to take Nero to London, where it was performed in the Olympia exhibition hall. It proved to be a success. However, the impresario preferred to distance him from the circus. In 1891 he staged the Venice At Olympia exhibition at Olympia. It featured Murano glass-blowing, over a mile of canals, a sea battle, and a highly sensational adaptation of The Merchant of Venice. It proved to be popular with the sort of middle-class people who would holiday by taking a Cook's Tour.

The Royal Society of Arts

William Shipley was a drawing master from Northamptonshire. In 1754 founded the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce. Six years later the organisation held the first organised art exhibition in England.

In 1774 the institution moved into its home, a Robert Adam-designed building that was part of the Adelphi development. The Society's hall features a mural that was created by James Barry over the years 1777-83. When the painter started on the work, he seemed to be about to put his stamp on London's art world. When he finished it, he was a spent force.

In 1847 the Society received its royal charter. The body played an important part in organising the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Great Exhibition of 1862, the series of exhibitions that took place in South Kensington during the mid-1880s, and the Festival of Britain in 1951.

In 1852 the Society mounted the first photographic exhibition. Two years later it held the first educational exhibition. In 1856 the body started holding educational examinations; this led to the establishment of the R.S.A. Examinations Board. Eight years later it awarded its inaugural Albert Medal to Rowland Hill the postal reformer.¹ In 1867 the Society erected London's first blue plaque in Holles Street; this commemorated the poet Lord Byron. In 1908 the Society received permission to term itself the Royal Academy of Arts.

Members of the Society have included: Adam Smith, Captain Bligh, Charles Dickens, and Karl Marx.

Location: 8 John Adam Street, WC2N 6EZ (brown, red)

Website: www.thersa.org

¹. It was as a result of Rowland Hill's pioneering work in organising the United Kingdom's postal system that Britain became the only country the name of which is not borne on its own stamps.

White City

Imre Kiralfy was a Hungarian showman. He had mounted successful exhibition at both Olympia and Earl's Court. He developed the White City exhibition space for the Franco-British exhibition of 1908. The site took its name the colour of its buildings. The site hosted the London Olympics later that year.

Location: Ariel Way, W12 7GF. The Westfield shopping complex now occupies much of the site.

David Backhouse 2024